In the character design area, you can see one of the new sets of hands. I've also relayered the pants so they cover the boot tops, as someone pointed out in comments that the last version of this didn't look right. I've added a new feature, launched with the little pencil icon at the bottom right corner of the character window, that outlines the figure and all the items in the image with black. I think it helps the illustration look more cohesive and really "pops".

The control buttons in order are:

Dupe: By default this is turned off, and the program works just like HM2.x -- click on a "RightHand" item, for instance, and the old one gets removed, replaced with the new. Check the box instead and you can add as many of each sort of item as you like. So in the example, the previous hand remains and is joined by a second, third, fourth, etc.

Mirror: Flips the current item left-to-right and right-to-left, like you were looking at it in a mirror.

Mask: Clicking this button changes the cursor into a domino mask (get it?!). Clicking on any item in the character build window will set it as the current item's mask. So for instance, if you have the LeftItem "Colt 45" set as active, click the Mask button, and then click on the LeftHand, the hand will mask out the handle of the gun where the fingers overlap. This will also let you do things like mask out the insignia with the body, so only the part of an extra-large insignia that coincides with the figure will show, like the lightning bolts in a previous post.

Layer Up: Pretty self-explanatory.

Layer Down: Ditto.

Paint: Click this button and the cursor changes into a paintbrush. Click on any item in the character design window to apply the color selections of the current item. So let's say you paint the chest piece darker and lighter blue, as I did in the sample. I liked it and wanted to carry that color scheme to the other clothing elements, so I clicked Paint, then clicked on each glove, each boot, and the shoulder pads to quickly make them all match.

Color All Hair: Applies the current item's color scheme to all Hair and FacialHair items at once.

Color All Skin: Applies the current item's color scheme to all Head, Body, RightHand, and LeftHand items at once.

Clear: The cursor turns into an "x" and clicking on any item in the character design window will remove it from the figure.

Clear All: Removes all items and colors from the design window.

Lots of items and a few new features yet to come, but this is the progress to date.

Also , I hope you remember to include the preview mode like you considered adding, I like that you didn’t have the sword cut off at the boarder of the character area and it extended a bit into the control area but I’d rather not have to photohop the control screen from around the sword

Its looking great Jeff. I love the paint feature that you mentioned I hope to see it carried over to HM3. I glad you decided to work on the pants/boots thing that happend alot in HM2.5 . I can’t wait to play the finished version.

Very super cool. The hand looks great. Looking at the capture made me think that it would be cool (in keeping with a lot of suggestions)to have more cyber themed gauntlets or wristbands. At any rate, can’t wait to see what’s next!

Have you considered using more than two colors for each item? Touch and paint would work nice. That way you could paint each section of clothing or weapon abd in some cases skin a different color. You can still keep the color1, color2 palettes…you can have as many colors that you can fit on color1 and then have extra colors on color2. Blended colors would be nice too. That would allow clothes to look worn or stained, weapons and stuff too.

Each color area has to be defined in Flash as a symbol, placed, and given a name. There also has to be support for targeting that symbol and applying the color transformation to it. I can’t think how I could do what you’re suggesting.

The Marvel Character Creator ( http://marvelkids.marvel.com/create_your_own_superhero ) Uses a touch and paint color system and I hate it. It’s very hard to get into small items to paint them and you ( well I anyway ) end up painting the wrong thing over and over until you finally hit the exact right spot to actually get the color where you wanted it to begin with. Not a paint by touch feature is a bad idea unless there is a zoom in feature also to make those small areas bigger.

The way mine works is that you just click anywhere at all on the item, and all three colors get applied to the appropriate spot, so there’s no real noodling around trying to hit the right spot. Plus, each item glows blue when you’re on it, so that’ll help.

But best of all, you don’t have to use it at all, you can still use the color swatches just like in HM2.x. The brush is a lot faster IMHO once you’ve got a set of three colors you like and you just want to slap it on a bunch of other items, but the other way’s fine and certainly still there as well.

What Jeff is talking about isnt like that its more you automaticly copy the colors from one item to another without having to search them over again (or at least thats what I took you to be meaning.) So say you have a shirt that is black and red and you want the gloves to match. You click the paintbrush and then the item and it puts the color in.

And If you were speaking to me Dani, I’ll Butt out when Jeff tells me to butt out. The whole point of these previews are to get our feed back and ideas so as to make the new application as best as it can be. As I said once before we all have bucket fulls of ideas we would like to see in the next HM but there is only one person who has to make those ideas work, and thats Jeff. If we don’t speak up he has no idea what we want and if he doesn’t like a purposed idea he I am certain will tell us so.

100% agree with Kaldath there, that’s the whole point of me making these posts — user feedback and ideas are absolutely vital for making the program work and for it to be as good as it can be. Reading, responding to, and incorporating the feedback doesn’t delay the work, it makes the work possible.

The spec calls for 10-20 items per slot, so you can expect at least that many faces. I didn’t separate out the face into its components on this one, for the minis the goal is to try and have fewer slots to better suit a more casual, drive-by-user type of experience.

Dang, shields — I forgot those. Sigh. I’m kind of holding off on more hand-held items at this point until I get an idea for how big the final app is going to be. For these client-sponsored minis, I have to keep the overall final SWF down to a manageable, easily downloaded into the browser size, as everything has to be in the one self-contained applet.